Angel
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Lincicome: Plummer's rating not what we expected
October 18, 2006
The search for the real Jake Plummer is tortuous, rather like watching him play quarterback.
Still, curiosity demands to know just how bad things are for Plummer, if being in first place and having Cleveland ahead ease the ache of being, as it turns out, still better than Ben Roethlisberger.
In the weekly sortable statistics of the NFL, quarterbacks are rated in a complicated and incomprehensible fashion, using something called the passer rating. This attempts to grade the quarterbacks one against the other.
Only the specially gifted or terminally nerdy know how the thing works, but it is and has been since 1973 the way quarterbacks are judged. To illustrate how dubious it is, Brian Griese was the best quarterback in football in 2000 using the method.
On the other hand, when examining those players considered great quarterbacks over a career, the formula pretty much verifies their greatness. Steve Young has the best rating of all time. As expected, Joe Montana, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly are all high on the list.
Runners have it easy. Who has the most yards wins? Receivers, too, by receptions. There's Tiki Barber of the Giants and Anquan Boldin of Arizona, top of the current heap.
Quarterback is much more complicated, as Mike Shanahan often points out. And what we suspect is that the one playing for the Broncos is not playing too well. Whose fault this is may be as complicated as the proof.
The actual rating formula is more convoluted than figuring out the college rankings for the BCS (which might stand for Besides Colorado Schools, but that's another column).
It uses division and multiplication and ratios and fractions and decimals. The thing is too tedious to repeat here but in the last two steps you must multiply by 100 and then divide by six.
What we should know is what we know. A quarterback is good or a quarterback is bad or a quarterback is somewhere in between.
Who would you rather have playing quarterback for the Broncos, highly rated Griese (still No. 15 all time) or Plummer? That question has been asked and answered.
So, let's find out just how good or bad Plummer is. Let's use common sense first. Let's guess. Is Plummer worse than, oh, Tom Brady? Must be. Donovan McNabb? Most certainly. Rex Grossman, leader of the undefeated Bears?
Not on his worst day did Plummer ever stink as Grossman did the other night against the Cardinals, six turnovers all by himself. And yet still the Bears won, or rather, the Cardinals found a way to lose.
This is a familiar scenario. Bad offense, good defense. The standard for the Broncos defense may very well be to win a game when Plummer is as bad as was Grossman.
No, even on potential, only a fool would pick Grossman over Plummer.
The other undefeated quarterback, Peyton Manning, is clearly the class of the position in all of football, so any comparison to Plummer - nevermind the recent head-to-head results - is pointless.
Of the quarterbacks on the four other teams with a single loss, where does Plummer fit? After Brady, there's Philip Rivers in San Diego, Drew Brees in New Orleans and Matt Hasselbeck in Seattle.
We're still doing this on instinct. Other than Brady, and Plummer beat him this season, Plummer would seem to stand up to any of those. Rivers is new, Brees is reconstructed and Hasselbeck is the Plummer of the great Northwest.
Without checking yet on the actual quarterback ratings, the conclusion is that Plummer must be somewhere in the middle of things, not a Manning or a Brady, but better than, oh, Jake Delhomme or Damon Huard, somewhere in the pile with, say, Marc Bulger or Byron Leftwich.
Now, on to the weekly stats. Where is Plummer? To qualify for the rankings a quarterback must have at least 14 pass attempts per his team's games played. Griese's father, Bob, once won a Super Bowl throwing only 11 passes, but rules are rules.
There at the top is McNabb, no surprise. But in second place is Rivers. Then Bulger, followed by the better Manning and then David Carr of Houston, clearly no Plummer.
In fact, running down the entire list, through Chad Pennington and rookie Bruce Gradkowski and Charlie Frye, this week's opposite number in Cleveland, there is no Plummer at all, not in the first 30 quarterbacks listed.
According to the official rankings, Plummer is only the 31st best quarterback in the NFL this week, down four spots from last week, between Joey Harrington and Roethlisberger, now with a steadily diminishing rating of 63.1.
And what conclusion can we draw from all of this? Things are even worse than we thought.
The best we can do is again fall back on Mark Twain, who said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Plummer is one of those. Maybe all.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/sports_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_83_5074647,00.html
October 18, 2006
The search for the real Jake Plummer is tortuous, rather like watching him play quarterback.
Still, curiosity demands to know just how bad things are for Plummer, if being in first place and having Cleveland ahead ease the ache of being, as it turns out, still better than Ben Roethlisberger.
In the weekly sortable statistics of the NFL, quarterbacks are rated in a complicated and incomprehensible fashion, using something called the passer rating. This attempts to grade the quarterbacks one against the other.
Only the specially gifted or terminally nerdy know how the thing works, but it is and has been since 1973 the way quarterbacks are judged. To illustrate how dubious it is, Brian Griese was the best quarterback in football in 2000 using the method.
On the other hand, when examining those players considered great quarterbacks over a career, the formula pretty much verifies their greatness. Steve Young has the best rating of all time. As expected, Joe Montana, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly are all high on the list.
Runners have it easy. Who has the most yards wins? Receivers, too, by receptions. There's Tiki Barber of the Giants and Anquan Boldin of Arizona, top of the current heap.
Quarterback is much more complicated, as Mike Shanahan often points out. And what we suspect is that the one playing for the Broncos is not playing too well. Whose fault this is may be as complicated as the proof.
The actual rating formula is more convoluted than figuring out the college rankings for the BCS (which might stand for Besides Colorado Schools, but that's another column).
It uses division and multiplication and ratios and fractions and decimals. The thing is too tedious to repeat here but in the last two steps you must multiply by 100 and then divide by six.
What we should know is what we know. A quarterback is good or a quarterback is bad or a quarterback is somewhere in between.
Who would you rather have playing quarterback for the Broncos, highly rated Griese (still No. 15 all time) or Plummer? That question has been asked and answered.
So, let's find out just how good or bad Plummer is. Let's use common sense first. Let's guess. Is Plummer worse than, oh, Tom Brady? Must be. Donovan McNabb? Most certainly. Rex Grossman, leader of the undefeated Bears?
Not on his worst day did Plummer ever stink as Grossman did the other night against the Cardinals, six turnovers all by himself. And yet still the Bears won, or rather, the Cardinals found a way to lose.
This is a familiar scenario. Bad offense, good defense. The standard for the Broncos defense may very well be to win a game when Plummer is as bad as was Grossman.
No, even on potential, only a fool would pick Grossman over Plummer.
The other undefeated quarterback, Peyton Manning, is clearly the class of the position in all of football, so any comparison to Plummer - nevermind the recent head-to-head results - is pointless.
Of the quarterbacks on the four other teams with a single loss, where does Plummer fit? After Brady, there's Philip Rivers in San Diego, Drew Brees in New Orleans and Matt Hasselbeck in Seattle.
We're still doing this on instinct. Other than Brady, and Plummer beat him this season, Plummer would seem to stand up to any of those. Rivers is new, Brees is reconstructed and Hasselbeck is the Plummer of the great Northwest.
Without checking yet on the actual quarterback ratings, the conclusion is that Plummer must be somewhere in the middle of things, not a Manning or a Brady, but better than, oh, Jake Delhomme or Damon Huard, somewhere in the pile with, say, Marc Bulger or Byron Leftwich.
Now, on to the weekly stats. Where is Plummer? To qualify for the rankings a quarterback must have at least 14 pass attempts per his team's games played. Griese's father, Bob, once won a Super Bowl throwing only 11 passes, but rules are rules.
There at the top is McNabb, no surprise. But in second place is Rivers. Then Bulger, followed by the better Manning and then David Carr of Houston, clearly no Plummer.
In fact, running down the entire list, through Chad Pennington and rookie Bruce Gradkowski and Charlie Frye, this week's opposite number in Cleveland, there is no Plummer at all, not in the first 30 quarterbacks listed.
According to the official rankings, Plummer is only the 31st best quarterback in the NFL this week, down four spots from last week, between Joey Harrington and Roethlisberger, now with a steadily diminishing rating of 63.1.
And what conclusion can we draw from all of this? Things are even worse than we thought.
The best we can do is again fall back on Mark Twain, who said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Plummer is one of those. Maybe all.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/sports_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_83_5074647,00.html